Tag: Watergate

No Ways ‘Tahd: The Saga of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Part 1 – Born For Politickin’

On By kingsjesterIn Politics3 Comments

Hillary Clinton 1On October 26, 1947, Hillary Diane Rodham entered this world in Chicago, Illinois.

Hillary Rodham, the oldest daughter of Hugh Rodham, a prosperous fabric store owner, and Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, was raised in Park Ridge, Illinois, a quaint little suburb located 15 miles northwest of downtown Chicago. Hillary has two younger brothers, Hugh Jr. (born 1950) and Anthony (born 1954).

In her youth, the future Democrat was active in young Republican groups, even campaigning for the 1964 Republican Presidential Nominee, Barry Goldwater.

According to Hil, she was inspired to work in some form of public service after hearing the Reverend Martin Luther King speak in Chicago. She became a Democrat in 1968.

The young ingenue attended Wellesley College, where she was active in student politics, being elected Senior Class President before she graduated in 1969.

After that, Hilary enrolled in Yale Law School, where she met Bill “Bubba” Clinton.  Afer graduating with honors in 1973, she then enrolled at Yale Child Study Center, where she took courses on children and medicine and completed one post-graduate year of study, which explains her whole “It takes a village” philosophy.

While a college student, Hillary worked several summer jobs. In 1971, she arrived in Washington, D.C. to work on U.S. Senator Walter Mondale’s sub-committee on migrant workers. The next summer found her out west, working for the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern.

Then, in the spring of 1974, Rodham became a member of the presidential impeachment inquiry staff, advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives during the Watergate Scandal.

Her boss back then, Jerry Zeifman, now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, tells a very revealing story concerning her work there.

According to Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former Yale Law Professor, Burke Marshall, also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair.

When the Watergate Investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation. That made the Future First Lady and Secretary of State one of only three people who earned that badge of dishonor in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

According to Zeifman,

Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.

Zeifman claims that she was one of several individuals including Marshall, Special Counsel John Doar, and Senior Associate Special Counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum, who plotted to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Zeifman believes  that they were deathly afraid of putting the break-in’s mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by Counsel to the President.  The reason being, Hunt had the goods regarding some dirty dealings  in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a kid busting open his Piggy Bank…dealings which purportedly included Kennedy’s complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

Hillary and her associates were acting directly against the decision of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, who all believed that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel.

The reason that Hillary and the rest came up with the scheme is because they believed that they could gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon.

In order to pull off this scheme, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

Hillary wanted to present in her brief that there was no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. Zeifman told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970….

As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer.

Douglas was allowed to keep counsel by the Judicial Committee in place at the time, which clearly established a precedent. Zeifman told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files.

That was  a mistake, per Zeifman…

Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public.

Hillary then wrote a legal brief which argued that there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding…ignoring the Douglas case completely.

The brief was so laughingly fraudulent, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had ever actually submitted it to a judge.

Zeifman says that if Hillary and her associates had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even be a part of the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.

After President Richard M. Nixon resigned in August, rendering the matter of her deception moot, Hillary became a faculty member of the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville, where her Yale Law School classmate and boyfriend Bill Clinton was also teaching.

Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton on October 11, 1975, at their home in Fayetteville. Before he proposed, Bubba had secretly purchased a small house that Hillary had previously said that she liked. When she accepted his marriage proposal, he revealed that they owned the house.

The information contained in today’s Blog may be found at biography.com and canadafreepress.com.

Next: Part 2 – The Arkansas Years

Until He Comes, 

KJ

Obama/Nixon: Presidential Scandal Deja Vu

On By kingsjesterIn Politics4 Comments

ObamaNixonDid you ever have the feeling you were being played?

All of us should have that uneasy feeling after President Obama’s Address to the Nation last night, when he announced that Steve Miller, acting Commissioner of the IRS, was resigning over the burgeoning scandal,  which saw the Internal Revenue Service being used as a Campaign Tool for the president’s re-election, by keeping Conservative Groups out of the fight, by making it difficult for them to obtain tax-exempt status.

Forgive me if I don’t leap for joy.

Two points strike me immediately:

1.  Miller was not Commissioner when the scandal happened.

3. Miller’s tenure as acting Commissioner was up in June, anyway.

Big Whoop.

Besides seeking Miller’s resignation, Obama said his administration would put in place new safeguards to prevent a recurrence of the IRS actions and said he insisted the IRS implement the inspector general’s recommendations immediately. The IRS had agreed to seven of nine recommendations contained in the report.

Obama said the improper behavior at the IRS was especially egregious “given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives.”

The report lays much of the blame on IRS supervisors in Washington who oversaw a group of specialists in Cincinnati responsible for screening applications for tax exempt status. It does not indicate that Washington initiated the targeting of conservative groups, but it does say a top supervisor in Washington did not adequately supervise agents in the field even after she learned the agents were acting improperly.

The Justice Department is also investigating the IRS targeting, as are three congressional committees.

Fox…Henhouse.

All of The Lightbringer’s machinations remind me of another Presidential Address to the Nation, given the night of April 30, 1973…

Good evening:

I want to talk to you tonight from my heart on a subject of deep concern to every American.

In recent months, members of my Administration and officials of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President— including some of my closest friends and most trusted aides—have been charged with involvement in what has come to he known as the Watergate affair. These include charges of illegal activity during and preceding the 1972 Presidential election and charges that responsible officials participated in efforts to cover up that illegal activity.

The inevitable result of these charges has been to raise serious questions about the integrity of the White House itself. Tonight I wish to address those questions.

Last June 17, while I was in Florida trying to get a few days rest after my visit to Moscow, I first learned from news reports of the Watergate break-in. I was appalled at this senseless, illegal action, and I was shocked to learn that employees of the Re-Election Committee were apparently among those guilty. I immediately ordered an investigation by appropriate Government authorities. On September 15, as you will recall, indictments were brought against seven defendants in the case.

As the investigations went forward, I repeatedly asked those conducting the investigation whether there was any reason to believe that members of my Administration were in any way involved. I received repeated assurances that there were not. Because of these continuing reassurances, because I believed the reports I was getting, because I had faith in the persons from whom I was getting them, I discounted the stories in the press that appeared to implicate members of my Administration or other officials of the campaign committee.

Until March of this year, I remained convinced that the denials were true and that the charges of involvement by members of the White House Staff were false. The comments I made during this period, and the comments made by my Press Secretary in my behalf, were based on the information provided to us at the time we made those comments. However, new information then came to me which persuaded me that there was a real possibility that some of these charges were true, and suggesting further that there had been an effort to conceal the facts both from the public, from you, and from me.

As a result, on March 21, I personally assumed the responsibility for coordinating intensive new inquiries into the matter, and I personally ordered those conducting the investigations to get all the facts and to report them directly to me, right here in this office.

I again ordered that all persons in the Government or at the Re-Election Committee should cooperate fully with the FBI, the prosecutors, and the grand jury. I also ordered that anyone who refused to cooperate in telling the truth would be asked to resign from Government service. And, with ground rules adopted that would preserve the basic constitutional separation of powers between the Congress and the Presidency, I directed that members of the White House Staff should appear and testify voluntarily under oath before the Senate committee which was investigating Watergate.

I was determined that we should get to the bottom of the matter, and that the truth should be fully brought out—no matter who was involved.

Sound familiar?

William Shakespeare wrote that

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

Even though Richard Milhous Nixon excelled at Foreign Policy, opening new areas of trade with China and other countries, he will always be remembered for the political chicanery known as Watergate.

And, now, even though Barack Hussein Obama, will still go down in history as America’s first Black President (second, if you count Bubba Clinton), that honor will be eclipsed. 

Instead, he will be known as the president who brought Chicago Politics to the White House.

So, as all these scandals continue to develop and surround The One who was supposed to bring America “Hope and Change”, consider the following…

Obama has actually trumped Nixon in a very sad and macabre way: Watergate was just a break-in. The Attack in Benghazi cost 4 brave Americans their lives.

Until He Comes,

KJ

Charles “Chuck” Colson: From Administrator to Evangelist

On By kingsjesterIn Christianity, Politics1 Comment

The Watergate Scandal was a dark point in the history of the American Presidency. But it was a momentary darkness, which led to a lifetime of life-saving ministry.

On 17th June 1972, 5 men were arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. Initially, it was assumed that it was just a simple burglary that went wrong. However, when investigations started, it was found out that the men had entered the office to repair bugs that they had installed into the office nearly a week earlier.

On further investigations, it was found out that the so-called burglars were some how connected to the White House and were given the task to spy on the Democrats. One of the “burglars” arrested was named Jim McCord Jr. He was the security officer for Richard Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President. Even a diary was found which had the contact number of E Howard Hunt, who was an intelligence agent and a member of the White House plumbers, which was a secret team of agents working at the behest of the White House. The investigators went on to figure out that the E Howard Hunt along G Gordon Liddy were the brains behind the first break in. Soon it was found that there were many agents responsible for spying on the Democrats. A check meant for Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was traced to the bank account of one of the burglars. This led the investigators to conclude that the campaign funds were being used to fund these illegal activities. However, even at this stage, it did not stop Richard Nixon, a Republican, to win the US president election.

James McCord sent a letter to the trial judge naming other people who were part of this conspiracy. With more and more evidence being unearthed, it was soon clear that Richard Nixon was personally involved in the scandal along with several members from his administration. It was also discovered that many of the conversations regarding the conspiracy took place in the Oval Office and these conversations were taped. Initially, Nixon denied the presence of the tapes, but due to US Supreme Court order, he was forced to hand over the tapes containing the damning conversations. However, some important conversations from these tapes were missing.

The US Congress was forced to begin the process of impeachment against Richard Nixon. However, before the culmination of the process, Nixon resigned on 9th August 1974. While Nixon himself did not serve any prison time, many of his aides were found guilty by the Grand Jury.

One of the men who helped to plan the break-in was Charles “Chuck” Colson.

Charles Wendell Colson was born in Boston in October, 1931. After graduating from Brown University Colson joined the U.S. Marine Corps (1953-55). This was followed by the post of Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1955–56).

Colson was a member of the Republican Party and in 1956 he became Administration Assistant to Senator Leverett Saltonstall. In 1961 Colson became a partner in the Gadsby and Hannah Law Firm.

In 1969 Colson was appointed to the White House staff as Counsel to President Richard Nixon. Colson also began involved in the activities of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). On 20th March, 1971, at a meeting of CREEP it was agreed to spend $250,000 “intelligence gathering” operation against the Democratic Party.

Colson and John Ehrlichman appointed E. Howard Hunt as a member of the White House Special Investigations Unit. On 15th May Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate George Wallace. As a result Colson ordered Hunt to break into Bremer’s apartment to see if he could find any information that the Democratic Party was involved in the assassination. However, some have claimed that Hunt’s role was to remove incriminating documents from Bremer’s home.

…In 1974, Colson entered a plea of guilty to Watergate-related charges. He also pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Daniel Ellsberg case. He was given a one-to-three year sentence. However, he only served seven months at Alabama’s Maxwell Prison.

In 1976, Colson founded Prison Fellowship Ministries, which has become the world’s largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, crime victims, and their families. Colson has visited prisons throughout the US and the world and has built a movement working with more than 40,000 prison ministry volunteers, with ministries in 100 countries. Colson became highly critical of the prison system and in 1983 he established Justice Fellowship, a faith-based criminal justice reform group.

Chuck Colson passed away yesterday.

Chuckcolson.org has posted the following tribute:

Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most eloquent and influential voices today with the death of Charles W. “Chuck” Colson. The Prison Fellowship and Colson Center for Christian Worldview founder died at 3:12 p.m. on Saturday from complications resulting from a brain hemorrhage. Colson was 80.

A Watergate figure who emerged from the country’s worst political scandal, a vocal Christian leader and a champion for prison ministry, Colson spent the last years of his life in the dual role of leading Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, and the Colson Center, a teaching and training center focused on Christian worldview thought and application.

Colson was speaking at a Colson Center conference when he was overcome by dizziness. Quickly surrounded by friends and staff, Colson was sent to the Fairfax Inova Hospital in Fairfax, Virginia. On March 31, he underwent two hours of surgery to remove a pool of clotted blood on the surface of his brain. At times, Chuck showed encouraging indicators of a possible recovery, but his health took a decided turn, and he went to be with the Lord. His wife, Patty, and the family were with him in the last moments before he entered eternity.

Revered by his friends and supporters, Colson won the respect of those who disagreed with his religious and political views thanks to his tireless work on behalf of prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families. Colson maintained that the greatest joy in life for him was to see those “living monuments” to God’s grace: Prisoners transformed by the love of Jesus Christ. And thanks to the work of Colson and Prison Fellowship volunteers across the country, there are thousands of those living monuments among us today.

A remarkable man.  A remarkable life.  A merciful, redeeming God.